lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "culture" Category
Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Cultural Pioneering
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping | Contextual Training
Christendom bore no real need for leaders who were cultural pioneers. After all, if the culture is already Christian, what do we have to pioneer? It would be logical to conclude then, that as Christendom crumbles, the need for leaders with the skills for cultural pioneering would increase. This would be true and mistaken at the same time. It’s true that we have a greater and greater need for cultural pioneers, but the crumbling of Christendom isn’t the reason. Rather, a missional vision of the church carries with it an inherent need for leaders who serve as cultural pioneers which means we need a vision of theological education capable of equipping men and women for this task.
Allow me to offer just 2 basic points to support my argument for this need.
First, missional churches operate out of the assumption that mission is part of God’s very character and nature. God sends the son, the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit, the Trinity sends the Church as the Body of Christ. Little wonder then that missional church leaders lament the modern phenomenon of churches playing the role of vendors of religious goods and services that spend the bulk of their time, energy, and money trying to get people to come. Missional churches are not those who focus on offering the best “Christian” stuff (teaching, programs, groups, etc.), but those who focus on engaging with world’s darkest and toughest needs.
Second, missional churches tend to be marked by their attention to Jesus’ announcement of the good news of God’s Kingdom, the new reality inaugurated in Jesus. Just as Jesus stood at odds with the culture of his day on account of his allegiance to God’s Kingdom, so too the missional church of today will find itself at odds with the culture of our day as we seek to embody God’s Kingdom through faith in Jesus. To understand the local church as an expression of a new reality, however, means that we recognize the need for leaders capable of cultural pioneering.
Current models of theological education seem to come up short in terms of their fit to equip male and female leaders on both these counts. How then are we to go about doing so? I offer three ideas for the training of cultural pioneers.
1) Deep involvement in a missional community
There is no better way to learn how to be a cultural pioneer that to participate in a community that is seeking to do this very thing. My hope and expectation would be that to a great degree, the various aspects of this missional vision of theological education that I have been describing would all serve to produce leaders who think and act in terms of cultural pioneering. I have a hard time imagining that someone could give themselves to a process of formation that is rooted in community and centered around character formation through the shaping of Kingdom convictions and contextual training and emerge as someone who would rather manage a program driven group of individuals than lead a community into the world as an expression of God’s alternative reality.
2) Encourage Cultural Creation & Cultivation
I am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Culture Making, for my thinking (and language) on this. The power and trajectory of Christendom resulted in a church that, at various times, thought of “culture” as some monolithic thing that it could condemn, critique, copy, or consume. Only now, as we increasingly find ourselves on the margins of society, are we rediscovering the postures of creating and cultivating culture. We create culture through values, practices, and imagination. However, as Crouch says,
We cannot make culture without culture. And this means that creation begins with cultivation – taking care of the good things culture has already handed on to us. The first responsibility of culture makers is not to make something new but to become fluent in the cultural tradition to which we are responsible. Before we can be culture makers, we must be culture keepers.
This leads us directly to the third ingredient in forming cultural pioneers.
3) Practicing Discernment
The need for skilled discernment is going nowhere but up! Never before in human history has so much information and so many opinions been so easily accessible. Add to this the pervasive individualism and relativism of Western culture and you are left with a cultural nightmare for those who believe in such a thing as contextual faithfulness to biblical truth. As Jesus’ disciples were, we must be taught to see, hear, and feel with eyes, ears, and hearts attuned to the reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst. How are we ever to create culture unless we can discern our way through it as followers of Jesus? This takes years of practice within community and remains a lifelong discipline.
Are there other aspects of cultural pioneering that you think I’m missing? How else might we equip others to this end? Anxious for your (end of the year and end of the series!) thoughts.
Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Conviction Shaping
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation
One of the greatest needs of missional churches is leaders who have been trained how to think as opposed to what to think, who are able to equip others for deep incarnational witness, and whose character and giftedness has been practiced and affirmed in the context of a local community. This was the point of my previous post – the centrality of character formation in a missional vision of theological education.
From here, I want to go on to say that a missional vision of theological education will emphasize the shaping of Kingdom convictions in leaders.
No one is more responsible for my appreciation of this dimension of a missional vision of theological education than the late Dr. James Wm. McClendon. His work was the center of my masters thesis and continues to shape my life as a disciple of Jesus is all its forms.
The most admirable Christian leaders are not those men and women who have sought to do great, big things for the Kingdom, but who have faithfully responded to that which God has done in their lives. They were and are men and women of conviction and as McClendon points out,
Convictions are not so much things we have, but things which have us.
Christendom, as a system of coercive power, naturally emphasizes control. This emphasis has resulted in two dominant emphases in the shaping of leaders – the passing on of systems of belief and/or the training in particular models of ministry. I am against neither of these things in themselves. I am merely suggesting that they need to be peripheral, not central to the training of missional leaders. I advocate for the centrality of conviction shaping for three main reasons.
1) The shaping of Kingdom convictions is primarily the Holy Spirit’s work.
We have fooled ourselves into believing that the passing on of right doctrine or refined training in ministry models are of prime importance in theological education. When these are our emphases, not only do we create one-dimensional leaders, but we run the greater risk of making Christian leadership development primarily a human enterprise – like training a mechanic or a sales person. The shaping of convictions in correspondence with the reality of God’s Kingdom is much more fluid and finally contingent on the work of the Holy Spirit. We need leaders who not so much “get God,” but ones “God’s got.”
2) The shaping of Kingdom convictions is more in accord with missional theology.
We all see and interpret things through various lenses depending on our background, experience, education, culture and so on. Thus, missional theology is never fixed, but exists in constant interaction with Scripture, our community & its tradition, and our broader context & experience.
As I’ve said before, theological convictions are not the same as theological foundations. Churches built on theological foundations and hell bent on being right are brought low when those foundations are assaulted. Missional churches on the other hand, more concerned with being faithfully responsive, embrace the notion that,
The convictions that cohere within any community are in principle always subject to rejection, reformulation, improvement or critical revision, and the church is no exception to this principle.
We desperately need leaders who are more convicted about a way of believing, living, and following, than they are a way of knowing or structuring.
3) The shaping of Kingdom convictions naturally flows from community rootedness and character formation.
Convictions are the result of the work of the Holy Spirit in the midst of our community-rooted character development. As McClendon has shared, the shaping of Kingdom convictions are not
…so many ‘propositions’ to be catalogued or juggled like truth-functions in a computer, but are inextricably interwoven with ecclesial practices such as baptism and eucharist, hospitality and reconciliation, peacemaking and the mutual bearing of burdens, where they ‘give shape to actual lives and actual communities.’
They are,
generated by ‘a shared and lived story, one whose focus is Jesus of Nazareth and the kingdom he proclaims.
This is what we see when we look at the relationship of Jesus to his disciples. The cultivation of a community of followers who, dense as they were, and prone to weakness, were convicted of Jesus’ Messiahship, his judgment and triumph over the evil powers at work in the world, and the beginning of the renewal of all things in his resurrection.
Think for a moment about the people who most inspire you and you enjoy following. Chances are the reason is that something has gripped them, you sense it in all they say and do and you’re interested, if not desperate, to know it for yourself. This is what I am saying, for the Christian leader, is the work of the Holy Spirit in accord with a missional theology that finds its home in the midst of community of people following Jesus on mission together.
Can you offer examples of this? Anyone who has counter-examples? How have traditional approaches to theological education helped or failed you in this regard?
Next up – the place of contextual training in a missional vision of theological education.
Some quotes and ideas stem from: Harvey, Barry. “Beginning in the Middle of Things: Following James McClendon’s Systematic Theology. Modern Theology 18:2, April 2002.
Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: New Soil
Previous Posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | Fruit of the Problem
After laying what I consider to be some necessary groundwork for this conversation, I’m excited to begin moving us in a more constructive path of conversation as we try to get at what a missional vision of theological education might entail.
A missional vision of theological education differs from our current one, not as a reaction to it – the classic pendulum swinging in the other direction sort of thing, but as a completely alternative paradigm. For the same reasons that megachurches can’t be missional, methods of theological education rooted in Christendom systems of coercive power are not designed to equip missional leaders. Thus, at least two different kinds of work are needed.
One, binding up that which is broken and doing what we can to restore it to health.
And two, planting new trees in new soil.
To the best of my knowledge, in the first instance, centers of theological education are…
1) Making missional adaptations to their curriculum: offering courses in missional hermeneutics, missional ecclesiology, missional theology, etc.
2) Offering more creative program options: utilizing online methods of delivery, developing intensive based courses, moving to cohort-based programs, etc.
3) Trying harder to actually partner with local churches to offer students more opportunity for in-service learning.
These are all good, helpful, and necessary changes within the current system. We need to see more and more schools moving in these directions.
But. These remain changes within a system that I am saying is flawed at its roots. It’s kind of like painting the walls, fixing the plumbing, and replacing the electrical systems in a house that has been irreparably eaten by termites. You may as well do what you can as long as the house is standing, but if you’re not also working on building yourself a new house, you’re gonna be in trouble.
This leads us to the second sort of work that needs to be done, not so much mending, but tilling and planting. To use biblical metaphors, I think of it in terms of wineskins (Lk. 5:36-38) and kernels of wheat (Jn. 12:23-25). Now is not a time for repairing old wineskins, now is a time for new wineskins and new wine. To go further, our current system of theological education (not unlike the dominant expression of church in the West) has a God-ordained opportunity to count its loss as gain in Christ. If they would only spend themselves fully on behalf of those that are coming after by being wiling to die rather than move into survival mode at all cost (a patently un-Christian stance for sure), what an explosion of Kingdom power we might see!
Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but as we move toward a missional vision of theological education, I suggest that it will be marked by the following:
1) Community Rootedness*
2) Character Formation
3) Conviction Shaping
4) Contextual Training
5) Cross-Cultural Pioneering
In the coming weeks, I hope to deal with each one of these in turn. I’m anxious for your comments and insights on this and future posts.
*I changed this from Communal Discernment to Community Rootedness as a more encompassing term.
Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: The Fruit of the Problem
Previous Posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem
In my last post I made the claim that our current model of theological education, in assuming a Christendom context, is better-suited to train managers of Christian religious institutions than it is to prepare missional leaders. If the root of the problem is Christendom, the binding of Christian witness and mission to systems of coercive power, we do well to ask what the fruit of the tree of our current system of theological education has been?
The version of Christianity which is bound to systems of coercive power within modernity has been powerless to resist the trajectory of that era. Thus, features like individualism, consumerism, and reductionism have been uncritically adopted by local churches and systems of theological education alike and have had mutually related effects. On top of this, there has emerged a rift between theological education and the ministry of the local church.
I’ve talked up a storm on this blog about what this has meant for the structure and ministry of local churches, but what about our systems of theological education?
Individualism.
For the most part, people make individual decisions to attend seminary and they are trained as individuals. I’m not saying you can’t experience community in seminary education or benefit from peer interaction, but largely, you choose your courses as an individual, study as an individual, get assessed as an individual, and then decide where to go and what to do as an individual. Not very good training for people who will then go on to be part of a staff team! Even less conducive to a truly missional ecclesiology in which the theology, spiritual practices, and Christan life are all rooted in community.
Consumerism.
Seminary is freaking expensive! I know I got some amen’s on that! That’s because there’s a market for it. Think about that for a second… There is a market (a system of coercive power if there ever was one) for being trained as a Christian leader. Now, make sure you’re not hearing what I’m NOT saying. I’m not saying it’s wrong for people to earn a living from educating others. Nor am I saying that buying and selling is in and of itself a bad thing. I am saying that this business of people needing to spend (or worse, go into debt) huge amounts of money to get a religious credential at an accredited institution is not only unsustainable as Christendom unravels, but has a negative effect on Christian leaders and those they lead.
Reductionism.
There are a number of ways we could go with this dimension of modern Christendom, but what concerns me the most is how we have reduced theology to information and the leadership of local churches to those best able to convey it. How else are we able to account for a theological system so heavily slanted toward lecturing, book reading, writing, and testing? It’s nearly all about the grasping and repeating of concepts. I’m not saying at all that there’s no place for this, but this feature of Christendom-based theological education has resulted in a form of Christianity that lives as though it’s possible to really believe something without embodying it. The Bible knows nothing of disembodied belief, but this is the very thing that our current system of theological eduction allows for.
These are a few of the most obvious fruits of theological education rooted in Christendom that I am thinking of. Are you thinking of more? What are the angles and nuances that you see from your perspective that I’m missing?
In my next post, I aim to take a stab how a missional vision of theological education differs from one rooted in Christendom.
Bi-Vocational Ministry & Spiritual Formation
In my last post about bi-vocational church leadership, I tried to make the point that this approach derives its theological significance from a truly missional approach to theology and ecclesiology.I wanted to winnow that thought down a bit further and suggest that the biblical appeal for a bi-vocational approach to leadership (and in my opinion, the biblical appeal for anything that has to do with the church and Chirstian life!) has to do with spiritual formation.
Far too often people seek to defend their church structures and practices because of their supposed ability to, “grow the church,” “meet people where they’re at,” or “reflect people’s cultural expectations.” These have a ring of nobility to them but are far off the mark biblically speaking. Far worse is when we are forced to admit that we do what we do because, “that’s how it’s always been done,” “if we try to change things people will leave,” “so and so will stop giving if we stop doing things that way.”
As the Body of Christ, we should have a singular defense for everything we do, namely, its power to spiritually form people and communities into Christlikeness.*
Here’s why…
There’s a battle going on. The Church, as a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, through its formational practices and structures, wages war against the principalities and powers at work in the world which seek to “steal, kill, and destroy” all that God would have us be and do.
In Christendom, the Church equipped itself to fight the wrong battle. Within Christendom, so much is assumed about the nature and purpose of the church, that we tend to ask pragmatic questions. Does it work? But, for those of us who realize that Christendom is crumbling and/or think that it was never a good thing to begin with, these questions aren’t good enough. We need to ask deeper questions.
Biblical faithfulness is about mission, not models. As one helpful commenter pointed out
in a previous post, the Bible does not prescribe one way to lead churches. There are several examples of what that looked like in the New Testament, but even these are not simply models to be copied as if we could then say, “We just do it like they did in the Bible.” The better way to understand biblical faithfulness is as an honest pursuit to join God in mission, not copy models. The Church is charged with the task of making disciples and is not given an exact blueprint for how to go about it.This brings us full circle. Those churches whose structures and practices mainly serve the ends of church growth, cultural relevance, and even conversion, miss the mark. They are fighting the wrong battle biblically speaking.
I am advocating for a bi-vocational approach to church leadership, not because I can defend it as THE RIGHT biblical model or because it’s most effective (Christendom approaches), but because the tendencies in our culture toward consumerism and individualism are so thick that faithfulness to the mission of making disciples, forming people and communities into Christlikeness, make it the most appropriate option (missional approach).
Hopefully that serves to clarify my thoughts and intention some.
*I was greatly encouraged today while viewing this seminar online to hear Dr. Darrell Guder comment that, “It was not the mission of the apostolic church to save souls! The apostolic mission was the formation witnessing communities.” This is a far cry from how we commonly envision the role of church leaders, but something we badly need to recover.
The Scripture & Culture Seminar with Darrell Guder and Andy Crouch
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Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
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